Leading Silicon Valley-Based Tech Investment Firm Funds Accelerated Growth Into Leading Global AI Insight Engines Provider

Coveo, a recognized leader in AI-powered insight, recommendations and search engines, has secured a $100 million investment from Elliott Management for a 27% stake in the company. The investment was led by Elliott’s Menlo Park, California-based private equity affiliate, Evergreen Coast Capital.

“Evergreen focuses on fast-growing technology companies that have proven customer traction and a clear opportunity to win in growth markets. With Coveo’s evident leadership in the machine learning applications space, the company clearly fits that bill,” said Isaac Kim, Managing Director of Evergreen. “Throughout our extensive due diligence, we have concluded that the company is the indisputable leader in its market, and with its management team’s extensive experience and R&D superiority we see this market leadership only accelerating in the future.”

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Recognized by Gartner as a Leader with the most complete vision and strongest execution score among Leaders in the Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines 2017, Coveo was also named a leader in The Forrester Wave: Cognitive Search and Knowledge Discovery Solutions, 2017.

“Coveo has enjoyed hyper-growth year over year. We have been at the forefront of digital personalization for the enterprise, a fast-growing market, with machine learning-powered search and recommendations software,” commented Louis Têtu, Chairman and CEO of Coveo. “With this financing, we intend to broaden our market footprint with even more aggressive investments in sales, marketing, channels, as well as launch new lines of business beyond the current Salesforce, Microsoft, and Sitecore products. In addition, we’re opening up a whole range of new opportunities by expanding our platform on Elasticsearch, enabling organizations to leverage Coveo as their enterprise-wide relevance backbone, from eCommerce to customer service and the intelligent workplace.”

The company intends to further expand its R & D team. Têtu noted: “As a leading tech and AI company in Canada, we’ve grown our R&D centers in Quebec City and Montreal to more than 200 developers and data scientists while serving a global enterprise market. We’re tapping into a local talent pool with world-class machine learning and AI expertise.” Coveo also recently announced its inclusion in SCALE.AI (Supply Chains and Logistics Excellence.AI), a Canadian industry-led innovation consortium with $230M of funding to accelerate the integration of next-generation AI and machine learning-powered supply chains in the Canadian economy.

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Coveo plans to use the Evergreen investment to accelerate growth mostly organically and through strategic acquisition opportunities that may arise. Jean Lavigueur, CFO of Coveo, noted: “We’re excited to partner with a Tier 1 Silicon Valley investment firm. Evergreen has been an absolute pleasure to work with. The quality of their team and their long-term investment perspective aligns with our goals, and really stood out from the investors we explored discussions with. With their investment and capabilities, we now have a war chest at our disposal to pursue our aggressive goals.”

RBC Capital Markets acted as placement agent for the financing. Full terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but following the close of the transaction, Evergreen will have a minority ownership stake in Coveo approximating 27%, and Bill Shaheen, Operating Executive with Evergreen, will join the Coveo Board of Directors. He added: “Coveo is already a tightly run ship, and we’re looking forward to helping them with their next phase of growth. I’m delighted to join the Board to help advise this strong team going forward.”

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